For what it's worth I'd suggest investigating the possibility of using Linux-Mandrake (7.1+) instead of Redhat.
Mandrake is redhat based so you get the same features and compatability but you also get a number of refinements. The ones that might interest you would probably include;
Better installer. You get more control and at the end you get the option to build a reinstall disk which can be used to automate subsequent installs on other identical machines. If your pool of 2500 workstations is made up from one or a few models this feature could save you a lot of time.
Better security. Mandrake lets you select a security level from "none" to "paranoid" and adjusts the host's configuration accordingly.
i586 optimisations instead of RH's i386 build. After using identical machines with RH and ML I think it's fair to say that this does seem to make a small but noticable difference in practice.
We run Dell servers that come with RH6 preinstalled and all of our workstations run Mandrake7. The combination works very well.
Folks who want to maintain their genetic privacy could give rise a consumer demand for new products that foil or confuse the sniffers.
For example, you could have a kind of dust that contains a huge collection of random DNA fragments. The machine could sniff that up along with your own contribution and hopefully the artifical noise would swamp out your signal.
Then again, this means folks are going to be adding artifical dandruf and somehow I can't see it catching on. Perhaps we'll solve it in the classic capitalist fashion - you can choose to pay to have the machine switched off as you pass by it.
Seriously, though : What happens when the collected information on, say, 10,000 airline passengers gets sucked off a cracked server and ends up freely avaliable on some website?
God only holds the patent if he/she/it exists and that may be very difficult to prove in a patent court.
To complicate matters, if one religion's deity does exist then presumably the rest of the divine menagerie exists as well - so then we have to wait until the gang finishes duking it out and decide which one of them has to take responsibility for cocking up and creating the human race.
Even after that there remains the problem that the deity who takes the rap for the humanity would have to fight various corporations through the courts and legislature for the rights to the genome. Unless he/she/it has been doling out a lot more soft money in Washington DC than appears to b the case recently they are going to loose that one.
For most of us it's not a lot of use, I'd agree. Howver, if you're a specialist researcher in numerous biological, medical fields (and possibly anthropology, archeology, geneology and others as well) this stuff is a potential goldmine.
Provided you have the software to mine it of course.
Putting the genome in the public domain is a great start but to make it truly accesable requires freely-availible (i.e. open source / GNU / FSF) tools with which to explore it. Otherwise, as you observed, it's pretty difficult to follow.
My guess is that if those tools appear then one day not too far away kids in highschool will do lab exercises in biology class that involve cloning genes and so forth(*). That may seem far-fetched but I suspect that we're witnessing a nascient technological revolution at about the stage that the current "computer revolution" was in when a bunch of geeks were doing apparently pointless things with the original Altair.
* If OS/GNU tools don't turn up most schools aren't going to be able to afford the tools - so no labwork.
Wow - The whole blueprint for a human being (approx. 750MB) almost fits on a CD-ROM. My Mandrake distro came on 6 CD-ROMs.
Then again, I didn't have to feed the distro and wait twenty years for it to grow into something useful. The difference is the genome encodes the potential whereas the distro encodes the actuality.
The article seems about as feeble as you might expect from someone who apparently thinks the Mac was the last significant breakthrough in the OS field. Man, I'd be ashamed to hand this vacuous clunker in as a school homework assignment.
My first reaction was that the potential for abuse of these things could be pretty high but on reflection it sems to me that, at least for the forseeable future, artifical chromosomes are probably going to fall into the catagory of (expensive) elective medical procedures. That would make them much less useful as a vector for sneaking debilitating stuff into a population's genome than a doctored virus or bacterium would be. If that's so then we might for once be looking at a significant advance that has more of an upside than a downside.
One interesting view of what a biotech-based future might look like can be found in Masamune Shirow's manga story "Appleseed". There are a lot of human/techno. themes woven into the complex plot but a central one is the idea that complex high-tech societies might need to be augmented with a bioengineered subpopulation (bioroids) in order to remain cohesive; and what that might mean for the nature of humanity.
The idea is that the genetic-based behavioural traits that made humans so successfull in the earlier phase of their evolution (agression, greed, tribalism etc.) might prove too disruptive for it to be possible to sustain complex societies with a very high degree of interdependance. In this model the very drives that led us to create the modern world eventually lead us to destroy it because we can't damp them down when they've no longer appropriate.
Overall it's a well drawn and well plotted story from a master of the genre. The anime (animated cartoon) version sucks rocks, however.
It also has some very cool mecha and other high tech toys and Masamune is also very good at drawing female charecters, which don't hurt the eyes.:)
I just spent most of a day reorganising the partitions on several machines (backup, repartition, restore, repeat etc.). A LVM would have been an enormous help.
As for it's being ready or not; IBM don't usually make this kind of announcent unless they've pretty much gotten the technology down so I'd expect the project to be well on it's way.
The discussion about computers in the classroom is kind of moot if there are no funds to actually buy and maintain the machines and to supply ancillaries such as software.
A friend of mine is a teacher in a Daly City school (a city near San Francisco). The only reason she has computers in her classroom is because she went out and got them from a company that was donating old machines. (She got into trouble with her principle for doing this - he paniced about the political implications of having a teacher obtaining computers without his intervention.)
Because of her efforts her students now have access to eight 486's and two pentium 133s. Without her efforts they would have nothing. The local school system has no funds for computers - they barely have funds for books.
I get the impression that this is fairly representative of the situation in many schools. A lot of retoric and showcase IT programs has obscured the fact that many schools, especially in poorer districts, have little or nothing of substance in the way of computers they can use.
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For what it's worth I'd suggest investigating the possibility of using Linux-Mandrake (7.1+) instead of Redhat.
Mandrake is redhat based so you get the same features and compatability but you also get a number of refinements. The ones that might interest you would probably include;
Better installer. You get more control and at the end you get the option to build a reinstall disk which can be used to automate subsequent installs on other identical machines. If your pool of 2500 workstations is made up from one or a few models this feature could save you a lot of time.
Better security. Mandrake lets you select a security level from "none" to "paranoid" and adjusts the host's configuration accordingly.
i586 optimisations instead of RH's i386 build. After using identical machines with RH and ML I think it's fair to say that this does seem to make a small but noticable difference in practice.
We run Dell servers that come with RH6 preinstalled and all of our workstations run Mandrake7. The combination works very well.
Well said!
Folks who want to maintain their genetic privacy could give rise a consumer demand for new products that foil or confuse the sniffers.
For example, you could have a kind of dust that contains a huge collection of random DNA fragments. The machine could sniff that up along with your own contribution and hopefully the artifical noise would swamp out your signal.
Then again, this means folks are going to be adding artifical dandruf and somehow I can't see it catching on. Perhaps we'll solve it in the classic capitalist fashion - you can choose to pay to have the machine switched off as you pass by it.
Seriously, though : What happens when the collected information on, say, 10,000 airline passengers gets sucked off a cracked server and ends up freely avaliable on some website?
God only holds the patent if he/she/it exists and that may be very difficult to prove in a patent court.
To complicate matters, if one religion's deity does exist then presumably the rest of the divine menagerie exists as well - so then we have to wait until the gang finishes duking it out and decide which one of them has to take responsibility for cocking up and creating the human race.
Even after that there remains the problem that the deity who takes the rap for the humanity would have to fight various corporations through the courts and legislature for the rights to the genome. Unless he/she/it has been doling out a lot more soft money in Washington DC than appears to b the case recently they are going to loose that one.
For most of us it's not a lot of use, I'd agree. Howver, if you're a specialist researcher in numerous biological, medical fields (and possibly anthropology, archeology, geneology and others as well) this stuff is a potential goldmine.
Provided you have the software to mine it of course.
Putting the genome in the public domain is a great start but to make it truly accesable requires freely-availible (i.e. open source / GNU / FSF) tools with which to explore it. Otherwise, as you observed, it's pretty difficult to follow.
My guess is that if those tools appear then one day not too far away kids in highschool will do lab exercises in biology class that involve cloning genes and so forth(*). That may seem far-fetched but I suspect that we're witnessing a nascient technological revolution at about the stage that the current "computer revolution" was in when a bunch of geeks were doing apparently pointless things with the original Altair.
* If OS/GNU tools don't turn up most schools aren't going to be able to afford the tools - so no labwork.
Wow - The whole blueprint for a human being (approx. 750MB) almost fits on a CD-ROM. My Mandrake distro came on 6 CD-ROMs.
Then again, I didn't have to feed the distro and wait twenty years for it to grow into something useful. The difference is the genome encodes the potential whereas the distro encodes the actuality.
The article seems about as feeble as you might expect from someone who apparently thinks the Mac was the last significant breakthrough in the OS field. Man, I'd be ashamed to hand this vacuous clunker in as a school homework assignment.
My first reaction was that the potential for abuse of these things could be pretty high but on reflection it sems to me that, at least for the forseeable future, artifical chromosomes are probably going to fall into the catagory of (expensive) elective medical procedures. That would make them much less useful as a vector for sneaking debilitating stuff into a population's genome than a doctored virus or bacterium would be. If that's so then we might for once be looking at a significant advance that has more of an upside than a downside.
One interesting view of what a biotech-based future might look like can be found in Masamune Shirow's manga story "Appleseed". There are a lot of human/techno. themes woven into the complex plot but a central one is the idea that complex high-tech societies might need to be augmented with a bioengineered subpopulation (bioroids) in order to remain cohesive; and what that might mean for the nature of humanity.
The idea is that the genetic-based behavioural traits that made humans so successfull in the earlier phase of their evolution (agression, greed, tribalism etc.) might prove too disruptive for it to be possible to sustain complex societies with a very high degree of interdependance. In this model the very drives that led us to create the modern world eventually lead us to destroy it because we can't damp them down when they've no longer appropriate.
Overall it's a well drawn and well plotted story from a master of the genre. The anime (animated cartoon) version sucks rocks, however.
It also has some very cool mecha and other high tech toys and Masamune is also very good at drawing female charecters, which don't hurt the eyes. :)
I just spent most of a day reorganising the partitions on several machines (backup, repartition, restore, repeat etc.). A LVM would have been an enormous help.
As for it's being ready or not; IBM don't usually make this kind of announcent unless they've pretty much gotten the technology down so I'd expect the project to be well on it's way.
A friend of mine is a teacher in a Daly City school (a city near San Francisco). The only reason she has computers in her classroom is because she went out and got them from a company that was donating old machines. (She got into trouble with her principle for doing this - he paniced about the political implications of having a teacher obtaining computers without his intervention.)
Because of her efforts her students now have access to eight 486's and two pentium 133s. Without her efforts they would have nothing. The local school system has no funds for computers - they barely have funds for books.
I get the impression that this is fairly representative of the situation in many schools. A lot of retoric and showcase IT programs has obscured the fact that many schools, especially in poorer districts, have little or nothing of substance in the way of computers they can use.